Hacker News Reader

Comment by didgeoridoo | Hacker News Reader

This article does a good job of outlining the challenges faced: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230217-the-61-year-long...

From the outside, it looks like a race between figuring out the biocompatibility and power issues for total artificial hearts vs. figuring out the immunological issues for xenografts (pig hearts, mostly).

If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that the xenografts win. It doesn’t seem like we’ve made huge strides toward solving the power and durability requirements of total artificial hearts, while immunology advances are happening rapidly. Exciting times, nonetheless.

View on HN

Totally, I've been following that space closely as well.

Amazing times indeed, we are seeing xenografts and artificial organs in use.

Would be nice if a pig didn’t have to die to save a human though. This is not something everyone cares about but some people (like me) do care. Hopefully some day we can advance the technology enough with artificial solutions.

Growing a human heart from scratch sounds like the ultimate bioengineering X prize.

https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2023/mini-hearts-dish-big-win...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25329-5

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2022/03/building-heart-one...

This is honestly a pretty niche concern. Even most religions that strictly forbid eating pork make an exception if a human’s life is at stake.

Your best bet would probably be in advocating for the pigs to be engineered to prevent cortical development, ensuring they don’t become anything beyond twitching, unconscious organ bags. In many ways I think people would find this more disturbing, though.

My sincerest hope is that eating animals becomes less popular over the next hundred years such that killing them for medical needs becomes less acceptable.

Even for vegans I would assume saving a human life to be a more worthy sacrifice of an animal life than for eating

I’m an atheist and do have concern for the slaughters that are done on behalf on my own life and consumptions. Removing (99%) of consumptions was easy. If a pig heart give me a significant portion of life (+20y) I would maybe take the pig life but not for less. An artificial heart would surely remove the moral dilemma. Despite you good faith, a zombie pig would make it worse.

Something like 6% to 10% of the population is vegan, a bit more than niche!

That sounds high. Are we talking about India here?

> That sounds high. Are we talking about India here?

It sounds high even for India. About 40% of Indians are vegetarian, a third if we exclude those who eat eggs [1]. The part of the country where vegetarianism is most rampant, the North, is also the highest dairy-consuming part of the country [2].

In any case, while medical veganism is something to think about, it's not worth prioritising until after we have reliable artificial organs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#India

[2] https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/there-is-a-scientific...

>About 40% of Indians are vegetarian, a third if we exclude those who eat eggs

Which you should not, since eating eggs does not make a person a non-vegetarian. The only thing that makes a person a vegetarian is not eating animal flesh. Eggs and dairy are fair game; it's only vegans who push it farther and forbid those. This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?

AIUI “vegetarian” in India usually excludes eggs. This likely means that a _majority_ of the world’s vegetarians do not eat eggs.

> This is basic stuff; has someone been trying to redefine "vegetarianism" recently?

Oddly enough, when the word was introduced to popular use in English (though note that similar _concepts_ predated it), it usually meant something closer to what ‘vegan’ does today. The current use of the word is a 20th century thing. Words get redefined, all the time; that’s how languages work. Deal with it. In this case, the word has generally tended to be defined in _more_ permissive terms, not less.

It kind of feels like activists have been trying to erase the concept of vegetarianism/pescatarianism in recent years while pushing full-on veganism.

That's probably not a good move if we want to achieve a pragmatic reduction in meat consumption to help reduce related CO2 emissions. A smaller step is a much easier sell.

>Would be nice if a pig didn’t have to die

Something a bacon lover never said ever . . .

tbh I bet plenty of bacon lovers feel bad that a sweet intelligent animal dies to make their meal, and if a perfect copy of bacon could be made without it I bet a good number of them would be happy to switch to it.

This does seem like a more "palatable" alternative and there should be excellent opportunity for the lab-grown pork to have a place on the table. Would seem less cruel to a lot of people I would think.

This bacon lover has seen how pigs are treated in industrial facilities and has lost all appetite. I rarely buy it, from a local place whose pigs are slaughtered not by low wage people in a dark slaughterhouse that must meet quotas and have very disturbing ideas of fun.

I do know what you mean.

I was raised as a pork lover but did stop as a teenager on my own a couple years before I quit beef. I think that did have a positive effect on my young health in the interim, but eventually everything was replaced by more comprehensive plant-based alternatives.

Still love the smell of bacon though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com